


Betrayal.

by reidbyers



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: F/M, Reader-Insert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-27
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-22 10:01:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13164612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reidbyers/pseuds/reidbyers
Summary: There was almost an element of disconnect that happened when you worked studying serial killers, you could convince yourself that you were good while they were bad and that was how the world worked. However the line was sometimes blurred and once you stepped over it, trying to find it again was impossible.





	Betrayal.

Spencer didn’t always trust what his mind told him. After trauma after trauma his brain often felt as though it swam purely in intrusive thoughts, violence and urges to do things that he didn’t want to do. It was only to be expected, he was comforted in the knowledge that he wasn’t the only one who suffered with the repercussions of the job but it didn’t mean he was any less scared. His instinct was often confused with the muddled up desires he pondered on, the most basic thing a person had and he didn’t trust it to keep him safe. **  
**

He knew deep down that something was wrong, it was easier to believe that his gut was wrong that have to come to terms with the truth. The long nights you spent away, the stench of bleach soaking into every porous item in his apartment; his sweaters no longer smelt like you but instead the smell of a memory trying to be scrubbed away. There were even things that Spencer couldn’t put a finger on, details only he could sense were now different. You had only been dating for a few months but he was not the kind to hold back, if he committed to someone then it was all or nothing and everything about his partner became his roots, he grew with them and died when they did so if something was wrong, he would always know.

Everything always went wrong. It was overly cliche to say so but sometimes Spencer felt as though he was cursed, that he was never meant to live a happy life because if he were then the whole world would implode or something stupid. His life was just various bad moments pinned across a black sky like the worst constellation, the kind no one wanted to spend too much time looking at. Sometimes though, once in a blue moon, Spencer would allow himself to be happy without the fear of something going wrong gnawing at his throat. It wasn’t easy but sometimes, just sometimes it happened.

The sight of blood barely phased him anymore, a dead body was a dead body no matter the damage done to it and getting emotional or disturbed wouldn’t bring them back, it was human to feel those things but that didn’t necessarily make them good things. Human did not equal good and Spencer since he met you had been feeling less and less like a human, more like a ghost, floating around the life he once lived trying to replicate the old but not quite understanding what had changed. The simple answer was you, but fathoming letting another person go was worse than any other demons rattling around in his head.

You though, one of the first things about you he had noticed was how poorly you reacted to the gruesome images plastered across the screens as the team were briefed for a case. He caught glimpse of the way your head would turn when the photos flickered up, your eyes tightly squeezed shut or the swallow he would just barely hear as you tried to compose yourself. It had almost become a little bit of a joke within the walls of the team, everyone knew how bad you were when it came to the bloody things and it had never been questioned. Time passed by and even more gruesome cases were pushed into Penelope’s Barbie pink nailed hands, Spencer didn’t assume you would react the same as that sort of thought wasn’t even a spark in his head but slowly he started to notice how the images didn’t repulse you like before. It wasn’t as though you were staring at them with vivid interest but that disgust wasn’t there anymore, the detest for what people were capable of.

All the colour was slowly draining out from around him, Spencer didn’t notice it at first because of how dark his apartment already was but it was when he went to look you in your eyes and saw how dark they were that he came to terms with the horrific and heartbreaking conclusion that maybe there was something you were not telling him. It wasn’t only your eyes, your hair and skin was duller, no glow or life to either one of them and your hands while still cold like always now shied away from the warmth of his own. He didn’t know how to fix whatever had happened when you refused to admit that there was something wrong in the first place, he wasn’t anywhere close to stupid yet in some desperate cling to hope you made yourself believe that he wouldn’t figure out what had happened.

Something had snapped. A wrong kind of gene, the activity in a certain part of your brain, something had happened that had changed a part of you. It felt as though a rabid dog had been unchained, no sense of understanding of the world apart from the urge to fight, to hurt others with no real rhyme or reason. Maybe after years of hiding behind a persona, the friendly, kind one that everyone loved, the act had gotten old. You wondered often if things would have been different if you had never accepted the job in the Behavioural Analysis Unit, if you hadn’t been subjected to countless images and real life horrors, bloody corpses and intestines, knives left in torsos and alleyway dumpsites. If they had never been introduced then perhaps things would have been different, you didn’t believe in fate, choices were made and the repercussions of those choices weren’t on some god or deity in the sky; they were all on you.

The first time you managed to convince yourself it wasn’t an active choice, your hands moved on their own as if being toyed with by a marionettist to reach for your gun, the same happened with your legs so as you walked down the cold streets and then up a strange apartment building you told yourself there was no choice. It was easier to tell yourself that you had no control over your body in that moment than to just stop, to stop walking and put your gun away and leave before you did something you could never turn back from. You didn’t even know the man, just that he lived alone in some rundown apartment block with damp walls and mold, the smell of a lack of care for the people living there stank throughout the hallways. It made pulling the trigger seem almost…a merciful thing to do.

Whenever Spencer railed off facts about killers the pit in your stomach only got deeper, a cave to hold all your anxieties and worst fears about yourself. Weeks had passed since the incident and since it was only a once off, it hadn’t become a FBI case, that of course was relieving but at the same time a strange disappointment filled you. Their studying of the murder in someway would have validated everything, their analysis explaining why you did what you did rather than just sitting alone in your own studies of your psyche. You didn’t want to be caught, that was a completely different thing altogether, no, you just wanted to understand why you were overspilling with these awful ideas.

It wasn’t only a one of thing though, perhaps to start with but nothing really stayed the same for long, even if it only was the smallest of details. This though was not that, this wasn’t dust settling on books in a abandoned library or the decaying of rotting fruit, it was the conscious decision to continue on despite the small voice in the back of your head telling you that this was wrong. After that, there was no coming back. Nothing would ever be the same and yet that wasn’t the scary part, you weren’t even scared of being caught anymore, the only thing that scared you anymore was the nights spent wondering how far you would go.

The day that Spencer found out was like any other, or rather the new kind of other where everything was okay but not anything special. He woke up to an empty bed, often he went to sleep in one too even if you were in the apartment so it wasn’t surprising anymore. He found you already eating breakfast, hair wet from the shower and some redness around your neck which in his sleepy state he just chalked down to the heat of the water. The day went as it always did, work came and went without a hitch and Morgan even invited you both out for drinks, Spencer was open to the idea but was quickly shut down when you announced you were busy. No one knew what you were busy doing though, Spencer had tried to ask but you had become a master at manipulating the conversation to avoid having to tell him.

He hadn’t planned to follow you out, by the time he heard the front door close it was 11pm and he was tucked away in bed trying to sleep. For a while after you had left he continued to lay there, unable to do anything but think about what you were doing. The worst thing he could think of was that you were cheating, it would make sense as to why you flinched whenever he tried to touch you or how he rarely got you to sleep in his bed anymore. It didn’t hurt as much as he thought it might, it almost was understandable as Spencer didn’t particularly like himself either. However, it was the not knowing that was driving him crazy, if he knew it was going on then in some strange way he felt he would sleep better but he was one of those people who needed to know everything, or else what was the point.

It took a while to catch up to you considering he had no idea where you were heading in the first place but even through the heavy rain he could tell you had somewhere in mind were you were heading, this wasn’t just some late night stroll to clear your head. Spencer didn’t want to have to be sneaky, didn’t want to betray your trust but he needed to know if that was what you were doing to him or was this his head once again trying to ruin the good things in his life, coming up with absurd scenarios far from reality. Following you without being caught wasn’t an easy task but it was necessary.

Forty minutes later and there he was, standing in a dark alley with a gun pressed to the base of his skull. Spencer didn’t have to be a genius to know who it was, part of him wished that he didn’t because in some twisted way it would make the pain lessen. A stranger could need something from him, he had already given you every piece of him until there was nothing less, no matter what happened next, it wasn’t going to be good. Through the smell of garbage and dampness he could smell your perfume that you sprayed onto your wrists, the wrist connected to the hand pressing the gun to his head. While he hadn’t seen what had happened when you disappeared out of his sight but a gunshot was impossible to mistake, he heard them replaying in his head constantly.

“Why are you following me?” You said after finally managing to cut through the tension hanging in the air, speaking was now somehow harder than shooting a man, it was easier to murder someone than to talk to your boyfriend and yet that wasn’t surprising. You didn’t apply logic to the urges you had, they came around and you did whatever it took to make them go away and if there was anyone who would ever be able to understand that it was Spencer, you weren’t about to try and explain it to him though.

“Was that you?” Spencer was talking about the sirens in the distance, clearly someone had called the police after hearing the gunshots and while that wouldn’t have scared you normally, now that you were stuck in that alley with the murder weapon and Spencer aware of what you were capable of. He was in shock which was more of a good thing than a bad, he’d much rather be unable to speak than to break down like he knew he was going to. For once he wished that his mind was just acting up again, coming up with the worst possible scenarios just for the sake of ruining his life but there was little he could do to manoeuvre away from the fact you were holding a gun to him. “(Y/N)…what have you done?”

“Don’t do that. Don’t act like you’ve never done something evil, I know damn well you’ve wanted to hurt people…don’t you dare act like you’re innocent all of a sudden.” Nights had been spent going over all the nightmares he had, the deepest of his fears being confessed to you and while it was a low blow to bring it all up now within the panic you just wanted him to be quiet. It wasn’t easy to hold a gun to him, you didn’t want to and you believed it was killing you more than it was him but what else was there to do? Spencer had heard of the recent shootings but never in a million years would have linked them to you, it was a deep flaw that he saw the best in the people he loved while with others he was far better at judging them as a whole.

Spencer attempted to swallow the lump in his throat, his fists tight either side of his body as he tried to think of something to say, anything that would somehow miraculously fix everything. In reality he knew what he had to do but he rarely lived in reality, he was in his head more often than not and that was telling him a completely different thing. He wanted to let you walk away, tell you to get out of the city and just live your life somewhere else, he wouldn’t even tell you not to hurt anymore people even though it was a complete disrespect to everything he had ever stood for. He couldn’t lose anymore people because of his mistakes — no one else. 

“You need to leave.” His voice shook in time with your hand, nothing within you wanted to use the gun but you also weren’t going to let him arrest you. Spencer had gotten more free passes on things than anyone you knew and while the things he had done had never been as extreme as the crimes you had committed, perhaps if he wasn’t stopped he would be in the same boat as you were. You didn’t want to leave, you liked your job and you loved Spencer even if you had distanced yourself significantly from him, it wasn’t from lack of love or a desire to leave it was instead the consequences of your actions. He could understand it, you wanted him to but would he listen? “You can leave, I’ll let you. If you don’t…”

Within the silence of Spencer’s pause he heard the safety of the gun he turned off, this was not the first gun he’d had pointed at him but it was the time the person behind the trigger had been someone he loved. He wasn’t scared, a sense of relief almost began to fill him as if this was the end at least everything would be quiet, no more late night panicking or flashbacks. The trigger ached to be pressed, and when you gently lay your finger across it everything felt right, like you were coming home, your hand steadied as you rubbed your thumb over the trigger with gentle ease.

“You have twenty seconds to get out of here.” Spencer’s eyes opened at the sound of your voice and the pressure from his head then gone, twenty seconds wasn’t nearly enough time to do anything he wanted to and barely enough to do what he was told. With his body now trembling like a leaf both from the cold and the shock wearing off, he turned around to face you for the first time. For mere seconds you looked at one another, all the hopes and dreams you had shared, ideas for the future that would now never be rushed through his mind and yet he had nothing to say. He simply tore his eyes away and hurried down the alley, you turned and watched as he vanished from sight.

That was the last time you ever saw him, the last time you even heard from him. He became a small image in the back of your head, a foggy memory of someone who you once loved but not enough.

**Author's Note:**

> If you like my fics please go follow me over on Tumblr at "sapphicpage" !


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